Elliott Thorpe, 91, Army Attache Who Warned of Japanese Attack

By New York Times Regional Newspapers

Published: June 29, 1989

SARASOTA, Fla., June 28—
Elliott R. Thorpe, a retired Army brigadier general who was chief of counterintelligence under Gen. Douglas MacArthur and delivered an unheeded warning about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, died Tuesday at Sarasota Memorial Hospital. He was 91 years old and lived in Sarasota.

General Thorpe, the last surviving member of General MacArthur's staff, may have been the last living witness to the signings of documents ending both world wars. In Japan after World War II, his duties included responsibility for Emperor Hirohito, who died on Jan. 7 this year.

As a first lieutenant in the Army, Mr. Thorpe stood guard in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, France, when the treaty ending World War I was signed on June 28, 1919. In 1945, he was on the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay when the Japanese surrendered to General MacArthur.

In December 1941 Mr. Thorpe was a military attache in Dutch-controlled Java when the Dutch broke a Japanese diplomatic code. One of the intercepted messages referred to planned Japanese attacks on Hawaii, the Philippines and Thailand. Warning About Japanese

Informed of the message by a Dutch general, Mr. Thorpe immediately cabled the information to Washington. But he found that his warning was not taken seriously. A week later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

As General MacArthur's chief of civil intelligence in postwar Japan, General Thorpe played a major role in reorganizing Japanese society. He set up a screening system to keep militarists out of the Japanese Government, supervised the release of political prisoners and helped determine which Japanese officials should be tried as war criminals.

General Thorpe, a native of Westerly, R.I., left the University of Rhode Island to enlist in the Army in World War I. Before World War II, he was lend-lease commissioner and United States military attache in the Netherlands East Indies, now Indonesia.

After his service in Japan, General Thorpe established the Army Language School and was military attache in Thailand. In 1969, he wrote ''East Wind, Rain,'' an account of his years as an intelligence officer.

In 1950, at hearings before a Senate investigating committee headed by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin, General Thorpe defended the loyalty of Owen Lattimore, a China scholar accused of being a ''top Soviet agent.'' Mr. Lattimore, who was cleared, died earlier this year.

General Thorpe retired to Sarasota in the 1960's and served as a commissioner with the Whitfield Volunteer Fire Department.

He is survived by a son, Elliott Jr., of Westerly. He will be buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Washington.